How can I use man without less?

Question

By default, man uses less to output text. How can I tell it to just output to stdout? My terminal emulator has a scroll bar and search function and I want to use those instead of the arrow keys.

Answer 1

Actually it uses whatever is specified in the MANPAGER or the PAGER environment variable.

Depending on your man implementation and version there could be also a command line switch to specify the pager.

With the man-db implementation I use all the below ways work:

MANPAGER=cat man man

PAGER=cat man man

MANOPT='-P cat' man man

man -P cat man

To set it permanently, just add it to your ~/.bashrc (or other initialization file used by your shell):

export MANPAGER=cat

That works with some older man implementations too, while MANOPT is man-db specific:

export MANOPT='-P cat'

(Better do not set PAGER that way. That one is used by many other applications too.)

There could be also a global configuration file. man-db has /etc/man_db.conf or /etc/manpath.config. There you can set:

DEFINE    pager    cat

But unfortunately that is taken in consideration only if neither MANPAGER nor PAGER is set.

Answer 2

Another angle: Similar to Tony's answer.

You can also redirect man output into a file and view it with your favorite text editor or even add bookmarks, comments, etc. to it.

man bash  > bashman.txt

I have a copy of the bash man page as well as just the sections on bash flow control and bash test flags saved as text files in my bin directory so I can load them right into my text editor (kate) for reference while I'm writing bash scripts.

Answer 3

Simply pipe the output of man to cat?

man ls | cat   # useful use of cat